At 13:34 yesterday we received monitoring alerts that BES servers across multiple sites had lost connection to the RIM network, all BlackBerry traffic in Europe goes through this. Reports from others across Europe started appearing shortly after. By about 15:00 this was mostly resolved.
This is the latest in a string of major BlackBerry outages across the globe in the past 12 months, which are completely out of the email adminitrators control. BlackBerry is quite a complicated solution behind the scenes when compared to other push email technologies such as ActiveSync Direct Push. A top level comparision is below.
-With BlackBerry you have an email server, a BlackBerry server, an internet connection, the RIM network, the mobile operator and the device.
-With ActiveSync you have an email server, an internet connection and the device.
As you can see the BlackBerry solution includes 3 additonal points of failure, all of which are managed by seperate companies. Both use the internet and although ActiveSync devices may connect through a mobile operator, it is just standard HTTPS traffic.
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